Sports|In This Corner, a Dominant Heavyweight Who Creates Much Less Buzz

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In This Corner, a Dominant Heavyweight Who Creates Much Less Buzz

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Coverage of the Jack Dempsey-Gene Tunney fight in 1926 took up three-quarters of the front page of The New York Times.

By Victor Mather

April 22, 2015

The Dempsey-Tunney fight in September 1926 got plenty of attention. A crowd reported at the time as 135,000 fans — including Charlie Chaplin, the cowboy movie star Tom Mix and the English Channel swimmer Gertrude Ederle — packed Sesquicentennial Stadium in Philadelphia for the bout.

Coverage of the challenger Gene Tunney’s victory by unanimous decision took up three-quarters of the front page of The New York Times — not the front of the sports section, the front of the whole newspaper. It filled most of Pages 2 through 7 as well.

The champion, Jack Dempsey, earned $850,000 (worth about $11.3 million today) despite the loss. “I have no alibis,” he said afterward.

From the bare-knuckle days of John L. Sullivan to the heyday of Joe Louis to the era of Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield, heavyweight bouts have riveted the country and the world. And the heavyweight champion has been considered to be the toughest guy on the planet.

But on Saturday, when the heavyweight championship is contested at Madison Square Garden, it may feel like something of a sporting afterthought amid events like the N.H.L. and the N.B.A. playoffs and the homestretch of the European soccer season. And it will be far overshadowed by the welterweight title bout between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao on May 2 in Las Vegas.

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A crowd reported at the time as 135,000 fans packed Sesquicentennial Stadium in Philadelphia for the Dempsey-Tunney bout.CreditHulton Archive, via Getty Images

In an era of multiple titles, Wladimir Klitschko holds just about all of them: he is the heavyweight champion of the World Boxing Association, the World Boxing Organization, the International Boxing Federation and The Ring, the boxing magazine. But his dominance has sometimes seemed to suck the life out of boxing’s glamour division.

Klitschko is 63-3 and last lost in 2004, a string of 21 consecutive wins. Before his retirement in 2012, Vitali ran off 13 straight wins over nearly a decade.

But notoriety does not always come from success. Tyson, and before him Jack Johnson, Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali, had no trouble attracting headlines outside the ring, for good or ill. Though he is engaged to the American television actress Hayden Panettiere, Klitschko has not received anything like the same amount of attention.

Klitschko’s title fight Saturday is against Bryant Jennings, who is ranked No. 5 by The Ring, which provides the most reputable rating of boxers. Jennings, 30, from Philadelphia, is undefeated. But part of the reason the fight has received scant attention is that there is little fear that Klitschko will lose. A bet on Klitschko would require as much as $20 to win a dollar.

At 39, Klitschko would surely seem to be ready to decline soon. But the list of his potential challengers is threadbare.

The No. 1 contender, according to The Ring, is Alexander Povetkin, a Russian who is 28-1. But Povetkin is 35, and his one loss came to Klitschko, in 2013. Klitschko has beaten the Nos. 4, 9 and 10 contenders as well.

Perhaps the man to challenge Klitschko will be Deontay Wilder, 29, an American who holds the one significant title Klitschko does not, the World Boxing Council belt. That title was held by Vitali Klitschko for two stretches, until his retirement.

Wilder won a bronze medal at the Beijing Olympics in 2008 and has a 33-0 record as a pro, culminating in a defeat of Bermane Stiverne in January that won him his belt.

The British-Irish boxer Tyson Fury, 26, has a record of 24-0 and a minor belt. A boxer from the Klitschkos’ home country, Vyacheslav Glazkov, 30, could also be a contender. Both men are talked up as candidates for Klitschko’s next bout. But in the loosely structured world of boxing, there is no guarantee that Klitschko will fight any of these boxers. And if he does, he may dismiss them as he has so many before.

Uncertainty helps keep sports exciting. Elmer Davis wrote in an article in The New York Times after the Dempsey-Tunney fight: “All the predictions and expectations about this fight were upset. Dempsey had hoped to finish his opponent with one punch and expected to do it within two rounds.”

During Tyson’s prime, he might have been more dominant than Klitschko. But the best-remembered Tyson fights came after that period: the loss to Buster Douglas and the two brawls with Holyfield.

After calling the Dempsey-Tunney fight on national radio, the pioneering broadcaster Graham McNamee concluded by saying: “There is a new champion. There should be every once in a while.”

For the heavyweight division to recapture some of its past glory, the best thing might be for its current mighty champion to look more human.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page B16 of the New York edition with the headline: With One Boxer Dominating, the Heavyweight Division Seems Light. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe